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Rollerball Reviews
"Rollerball" sounds more meaningful and exciting in summary than it is as spelled out in Harrison's screenplay and under Norman Jewison's direction.
It is viscerally exciting, at times gut twisting.
The combat brutality is strictly routine, and fails entirely to relieve the excruciating lethargy of Rollerball.
Jewison is nothing if not imaginative, and his film, while dramatically thin, is so technically, so structurally handsome, I enjoyed it throughout.
Although the Rollerball sequences are excitingly staged, director Norman Jewison's over-inflated Big Brother fable is dull and obvious when it leaves the skating arena.
The story fails to involve us in the intimate lives of any of the characters. "Rollerball" becomes a long stunt.
"Rollerball" is skimpy fare for those for crave science fiction.
So confused and so poorly articulated is Jewison's vision of the future, that it's hard to know what the message is.
It is in fact a simple tale, the familiar theme of sci-fi back to Metropolis, despite the costly dressing and the confusions of William Harrison's ill-made screenplay.
It left me feeling drained.
The ideas of conformism and corporate statism, intended to be Big Themes, would fit cozily on the 21-inch television screen, offending neither sponsors nor fans of Archie Bunker.
"Rollerball" is a brilliant movie, as powerful in its impact as a steel ball crushing flesh and bone.
The story may lack logic, but it has been clothed in such splendid raiment that one longs to overlook the fact.
When the action is on "Rollerball" has all the electric excitement lovers of the more violent movies could ask for.
"Rollerball" is an entirely hypocritical movie. It gloats over what it pretends to despise.
"Rollerball" is exciting and scary in the way that disaster, monster and cataclysm movies are.
Originality and brutality are the prime ingredients of "Rollerball."
Not even John Houseman's fine performance as a villainous corporate director is sufficient to make "Rollerball" tolerable.
It's a chilling view of the future Jewison gives us, and it would be more entertaining if the picture itself did not become as artificial as its environment.
The script is woefully thin and the attempt to create a fearful new world of robot-like science fiction is as dull as such a world would no doubt be.